Argentina’s restriction on beef exports to control domestic inflation and political upheaval could raise issues over reliability as a supplier. However, Russia has proven that wheat importing countries care more about value (quality and price) than they do about reliability of specific suppliers. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef and is expanding faster than any other supplier. Australia can be a somewhat volatile beef exporter due to more frequent droughts. India’s exports of beef are declining, and the rest are relatively smaller suppliers. As the world’s largest supplier of grain fattened beef, the U.S. has typically emphasized quality in its marketing approach. The mantra for less competitive or sma...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.